Behind the Book by Meg Wolitzer

I’ve always been preoccupied by what happens to people over time. I’ve spent more hours than I should studying the online adult faces of some of the kids I grew up with, looking for something that would explain how we become the people we become.And many years ago, when I discovered Michael Apted’s “Up” series of documentaries, which traces the lives of a diverse...

Opting out

First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes someone in a baby carriage, but what comes, say, 10 years later? A midlife crisis? In her smart new novel, The Ten-Year Nap, Meg Wolitzer explores this question through the interlaced stories of a group of women who abandoned their careers (in law, academia and the arts) to practice full-time...

The book of love

We've seen "Sex and the City." Now it's time for sex in the suburbs. The Position isn't exactly the frothy take on love offered by the famous HBO series. Instead, Meg Wolitzer's smart new novel delves into much heavier stuff, examining how sex is inevitably intertwined with all the moments of life that happen outside the bedroom. Roz and Paul Mellow wrote the ultimate 1970s how-to sex manual,...

Bewitched in the bedroom

At Eleanor Roosevelt High School in Stellar Plains, New Jersey, not much seems out of the ordinary one long winter. Rob and Dory Lang—married English teachers—manage to keep the spark alive in and out of the bedroom after 20 years of marriage. Their 16-year-old daughter Willa spends most of her time as an avatar online, as most teens in their community tend to do. The principal is...